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Beer Jerk, 2/2 Shaddock Street, Auckland (2026)

10/09/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // This week we're drinking a collaborative beer from two breweries that have suddenly found themselves related. Sunshine Brewing was dreamed up in 1989 by two Gisborne surfers waiting on a wave, and is now the oldest independent craft brewery in the country. Three Sisters is the young thruster from New Plymouth that came to life in 2017 after founder Joe Emmans decided to level up from brewing in his basement. A few months ago Three Sisters bought Sunshine outright. With their new Wellington taproom and large export orders to fulfil, they had just completed another successful crowdfunding run and were ready to invest in growing production capacity. The Sunshine owners were eyeing retirement and suddenly this became the perfect fit for Three Sisters to take the entire brewery (that would never have fit inside their New Plymouth site) along with their taproom, team, and IP. Both breweries are continuing doing their own thing but they are having a lot of crossover - The Sunshine brewhouse is 4x the size of the Three Sisters one meaning both labels can brew seasonal and experimental batches on the smaller kit and core range beers on the big one. This weeks beer is a collaboration that was brewed for the Smiths NZIPA Challenge.

BEER // Cold IPAs came out of Portland about eight years ago. The idea was to build an IPA with nothing that gets in the hops' way: a lean pale malt bill with no caramel or crystal malt, a lager yeast run warm so it ferments out clean and dry rather than throwing fruit of its own, and the hops loaded in late. What you get is a beer with the aromatic punch of a hazy and the finish of a pilsner. It's a style that is all about the hops, and the ones on this beer span thirty years of New Zealand plant breeding. Southern Cross is the old hand, released in 1994 and descended, via a 1950s crossbreed, from the hop bred to survive the black root rot that nearly finished the local industry. It smells of lemon peel and warm pine needles, a bit resinous, a bit herbal, and its low cohumulone means the bitterness lands soft and rounded. Then there is the shiny new hop Manilita, which almost nobody has tasted yet. One of the very few hops that makes it past Freestyle Hops' experimental breeding programme it brings grapefruit zest and sweet citrus with a tropical edge. I reckon it tastes a bit like Juicy Fruit chewing gum. Then there's the Nectaron, which went in as SubZero Hop Kief. It is concentrated liquid lupulin, made by freezing and separating the hop rather than dissolving it in anything that goes in cold, often right before the beer is packaged. This process extracts exactly the compounds we want in a beer like this with no vegetal character. Just juicy passionfruit guava stone fruit good times. It's a clean, lean, juicy, aromatic, crisp, hoppy treat.

BREWERY // Sunshine & Three Sisters
BEER // Coastal Cuzzies
STYLE // Cold IPA
ABV // 6.5%
ORIGIN // Gisborne and New Plymouth
TEMP // 4-6°C
FOOD MATCH // Asparagus & poached eggs on toast. Rhubarb & ginger crumble
VESSEL // Tulip

03/09/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // Brothers Geoff and Clayton Gwynne purchased the Northland institution, the Waipu Pizza Barn, in 2003. A decade later, they decided to open a brewery next door. The McLeod's name and design aesthetic pay homage to the Scottish settlers of Waipu, while their beer names often celebrate the stunning seaside landmarks nearby. McLeod's Brewery is one of the most highly regarded in the country, earning praise from judges, drinkers, and fellow brewers alike. Their 802 series of unfiltered IPAs get haze bois frothing every time and their Smugglers Cove series of barrel aged and mixed ferment beers are heavenly. The brewery and their beers have won countless medals and trophies - far too many to list here. No trip North is complete without stopping in for a beer and one of their famous pizzas.

BEER // For most of human history, beer was sour. The oldest known evidence of deliberately made alcohol comes from 13,000 year old stone mortars at Raqefet Cave in what is now Israel, where Natufian people malted and mashed grain and let wild airborne yeast do the rest. Lactic acid bacteria live on barley and wheat husks, so tartness was simply what happened. Only in the late nineteenth century, once Pasteur and pure yeast culture had explained the microbiology, did sourness get reclassified from normal to fault, leaving just a few regional holdouts with styles like Flanders Red and Gose. The method for souring these 'Kettle Sours' is to add a lactic acid bacteria (lactobacillus) to the sweet wort, waiting for it to reach the desired ph and then killing them off with a boil. A regular ale yeast is then pitched and the beer ferments as normal. The first kettle sours were only released commercially in New Zealand about a decade ago and the style quickly found a lot of fans, as well as haters. Wicker Basket is a kind of Berliner Weisse and has a decent amount of wheat in the malt bill to give it body that counters the tartness nicely, the wheat also helps with retaining the fluffy head that enables aroma. There have been previous iterations of Wicker Basket and the current one has a failsafe pairing of mango for a lassi-like sweetness, and the unique character of passionfruit. There's also a hit of Pineapple Express that helps give the beer an all round tropical lilt. A criticism I often have with modern fruited sours is that they can be too light-bodied, one-dimensional and acidic. Wicker Basket avoids all of these pitfalls and is a lovely well rounded and balanced beer.

BREWERY // McLeod's
BEER // Wicker Basket
STYLE // Tropical Sour
ABV // 5.3%
ORIGIN // Waipū, Northland
TEMP // 4-6°C
FOOD MATCH // Goat's cheese pizza. Mango sticky rice. Lemon posset
VESSEL // Tulip

27/08/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // It's shocking to think that it's been almost a decade since Urbanaut started brewing in beautiful Morningside in 2017. The original team are Bruce, Simon and Thomas who became friends during their days at Rangitikei College and they've been joined by a fantastically talented crew over the years. In the early days they were focussed on lager and IPA styles but they now have a reputation for pushing boundaries with their experimental beers including a transparent IPA Beervana release and brews inspired by donuts and gummy worms. Brewer Bruce honed his craft working with legendary breweries Fullers and Meantime in London while Simon and Thomas ran a property development company so their combined skills came in handy when converting an old props hire warehouse into a sparkling brewery & taproom at the end of the Auckland Beer Mile where Burgernaut serves up fantastic burgers.

BEER // In November 2017, Kim Sturdavant of Social Kitchen & Brewery in San Francisco took a punt on an idea which caught on like wildfire, becoming the hottest trend in beer for a while. He added amyloglucosidase, an enzyme that breaks down the long-chain sugars yeast normally cannot reach to a regular IPA recipe. The resultant beer was bone dry with no residual sugars and a reading or zero degrees Plato. It was explicitly the anti-hazy, a dry, spritzy correction to the soft, sweet, oat-laden juice bombs taking over the shelves and he called is creation Brut IPA. A few months later Urbanaut brewed the style to celebrate their first birthday and Copacabana quickly became their flagship IPA. We cannot know why they decided to brewed a 'hazed out' version of the beer, but only presume that it was to confuse both our minds and out palates. The only thing that matters is that this beer is damn tasty. It is still a pretty light bodied and dry beer but the addition of oats and wheat give it a touch more weight and silky mouthfeel. The hops are Citra and Nelson Sauvin, which Bruce names as his favourite American and his favourite New Zealand variety respectively. Citra, released in Yakima in 2008, more or less defined the modern hazy: grapefruit, passionfruit, lychee. Nelson Sauvin was bred at Riwaka and released in 2000, and is named for how much it tastes like Sauvignon Blanc, all gooseberry and crushed grape and a dry, vinous edge found in no other hop. There is some bitterness to back up all that aroma. I'm confused yet delighted - fence straddling never tasted so good.

BREWERY // Urbanaut
BEER // Hazy Copacabana
STYLE // Hazy IPA
ABV // 6.8%
ORIGIN // Auckland Beer Mile
TEMP // 4-7 °C
FOOD MATCH // Smashburger with pickles. Mango and green chilli salsa. Fried halloumi.
VESSEL // Teku. Stemmed tulip.

20/08/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // Brothers Geoff and Clayton Gwynne purchased the Northland institution, the Waipu Pizza Barn, in 2003. A decade later, they decided to open a brewery next door. The McLeod's name and design aesthetic pay homage to the Scottish settlers of Waipu, while their beer names often celebrate the stunning seaside landmarks nearby. McLeod's Brewery is one of the most highly regarded in the country, earning praise from judges, drinkers, and fellow brewers alike. Their 802 series of unfiltered IPAs get haze bois frothing every time and their Smugglers Cove series of barrel aged and mixed ferment beers are heavenly. The brewery and their beers have won countless medals and trophies - far too many to list here. No trip North is complete without stopping in for a beer and one of their famous pizzas.

BEER // Around 1720 a new beer style turned up in London and was named for the countless river and street porters who were the lifeblood of the city, and consumed this dark beer in prodigious quantities. Eighteenth century porter was mid brown and became more heavily hopped to compete with the more fashionable Pale Ales that were taking over. Those brown malts gave the beer depth and flavour that was somewhat reduced in the nineteenth century when the beer turned from brown to black. Those brown malts were much more expensive than pale malt because they were less dense (the extended time in a hot kiln dried and degraded the starch) and had a worse yield. So brewers found they could use mostly pale malt with a sprinkle (perhaps just 3% of the malt bill) of patent black malt which gives lovely black colour but virtually no flavour. Pioneer is very easy to drink and has all the character of those brown malts, Geoff describes it as "toasty rather than roasty". It's dry, restrained, cocoa and toast instead of burnt coffee, with a little US Cascade in there as a tip of the hat to the American West Coast porters.

BREWERY // McLeod's
BEER // Pioneer
STYLE // Brown Porter
ABV // 5.6%
ORIGIN // Waipū, Northland
TEMP // 8-10°C
FOOD MATCH // Mushroom pizza. Aged cheddar. Dark chocolate.
VESSEL // Nonic pint or tulip

14/08/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // Sprig + Fern is a brewery that marches to the beat of its own drum and that's probably linked to the unique story of owner Tracy Banner. Liverpudlian Tracy has worked in brewing for four decades since she got a job in a brewery lab straight out of school at the age of 16. She worked at iconic breweries including Greenalls, Bass and Lion before becoming head brewer at Speight's and Mac's. As possibly the most respected beer judge in the country, Tracy judges at the AIBA's in Australia and the Beer World Cup in the States. Hers is one of the palates NZ Hops trust to assess experimental varieties before the rest of the world gets near them. Sprig + Fern is in Tasman District, right among the hop gardens and there are 16 taverns in Nelson, Wellington and Christchurch that are all designed to fit Tracy's ideal beer drinking environment.��BEER // Single hop beers are nothing new. For most of brewing history you used whatever grew nearest, which is why Pilsner Urquell has been Saaz and nothing else since 1842. In more recent times, specific varieties have been bred for their bittering or their aromatic qualities meaning most beers are brewed with a blend of hops. There are many varieties that can do it all though, and it's a lot of fun to drink beers brewed with a single hop variety to get a proper idea of its character. The breeding programme in Nelson has given the World lots of incredible new varieties including Nelson Sauvin, Riwaka, Motueka and eventually Nectaron. It took almost 2 decades to arrive on the market and Sprig + Fern brewed the world's first commercial beer with it in 2020 to launch the hop. This is that beer (though the recipe has been tweaked over the years). It pours clean and bright and is a perfect showcase for the hop. Pineapple and passionfruit up front, peach and apricot through the middle, grapefruit pith on the finish. Be sure to take it out of the fridge around 30mins before drinking to bring it to a temperature where you'll get the best of the hop.

BREWERY // Sprig & Fern�BEER // Nectaron�STYLE // Pale Ale�ABV // 5.4%�ORIGIN // Richmond, Nelson, New Zealand�TEMP // 6-8°C�FOOD MATCH // Fish & Chips. Grilled Halloumi with Peach. Thai Green�VESSEL // Tulip

07/08/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // Alchemy Street is one of the smallest breweries in the country and one of the more inventive, tucked into an industrial pocket of Tauranga and run by brewer Ed Bolstad and his partner Kat. Ed trained as a chemical engineer and grew up in a household where everyone brewed, though he jokes that his dad's early efforts in the 1970s were "the world's most horrible beer". Years working in the West Australian mines funded the return home and the decision to do something they actually loved. He sharpened his skills with an apprenticeship at Cassels in Christchurch, contract brewed around the country for a while, and eventually took over the old Slab Brewing site in Parkvale. The name is a nod to Ed's chemical background and the everyday magic of fermentation, turning grain and water into liquid gold. Unfortunately "Alchemyst" was already taken, which led to some quick thinking and the invention of a Street that only exists in our minds. They made waves with fruit infused sours and big adjunct stouts, and have since built a core range that stands up alongside them. The brewhouse is tiny, the tanks few, and Ed is usually the one pouring in the taproom next door.

BEER // The origin of Mexican lager lies in a European debt collection that got badly out of hand. Mexico suspended payments to its creditors in 1861 and Britain, France and Spain sent a joint fleet to collect, and in 1864 Napoleon III installed the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor. It lasted three tumultuous years and ended in front of a firing squad. A story often told is that Maximilian brought Vienna lager with him, but the style actually took hold a couple of decades later when a Swiss brewer, Santiago Graf, brought in the country's first German ice machines making proper 'lagering' possible. The modern Mexican Lager style is a delicious fusion of cultures. That distinctive Vienna malt gives the beer body, plus biscuit and a freshly baked bread melanoidin character. The addition of the fantastic Central American staple, corn, lightens the beer making it that much more quaffable and suited to warm weather easy drinking. The Mex is a great local example of the style. It pours pin sharp and pale, it's crisp and properly dry.
BREWERY // Alchemy Street
BEER // The Mex
STYLE // Mexican Lager
ABV // 4%
ORIGIN // Tauranga
TEMP // 3-5C
FOOD MATCH // Grilled corn with lime and chilli. Bean and cheese quesadillas. Salted tortilla chips with guacamole
VESSEL // Tall pilsner glass

31/07/2026

This week Beer Club members are drinking…

BREWERY // Brothers Daniel and Reuben Rowntree grew up on Goat Island Road so, when they started brewing, the name was a given. The island was New Zealand's first marine reserve and is famous for the incredibly diverse (and friendly) marine life. The English name comes from a common maritime practice: European seafarers would release goats onto remote coastal islands so that anyone shipwrecked or marooned had something to eat. The Rowntrees have been brewing for years and they levelled up their kit a couple of years ago. Their keg-only releases have been popping up on local taps but this is the first time they have canned their beer. When we got a message from Daniel to let us know, we immediately snapped up the offer to share this beer with you wonderful Beer Club members around the country.

BEER // The first recorded XPA was released by Deschutes in Oregon in 2008 where the 'X' stood for experimental but the style as we know it now is a thoroughly Australian one. In the mid-2010s a style emerged which was thoroughly suited to the Australian climate and the growing number of drinkers who wanted something with flavour - eXtra pale and eXtra hoppy, but relatively restrained in abv. The light body makes it quaffable in hot weather and the Antipodean aromatic hops keep things interesting. Examples from the likes of Balter saw the style skyrocket across the ditch but they're still somewhat of a rarity here, which is why we were excited to see this as the first Goat Island can release. They call it a lawnmower beer but we reckon its much more than that - it's certainly crisp, dry, and quaffable but the NZ hop character brings lovely guava and white grape character that elevates the whole affair. It's a very well executed XPA and we're excited about seeing more of their beers around the country.

BREWERY // Goat Island Brewing �BEER // Lil' Ripper XPA �STYLE // XPA�ABV // 4.5% ORIGIN // Warkworth, Auckland �TEMP // 4-6°C �FOOD MATCH // Fish and chips. Grilled halloumi. Salt and pepper squid. �VESSEL // Shaker pint. Willi Becher.

23/07/2026

This week Beer Club members are drinking…

BREWERY // Alchemy Street is one of the smallest breweries in the country and one of the more inventive, tucked into an industrial pocket of Tauranga and run by brewer Ed Bolstad and his partner Kat. Ed trained as a chemical engineer and grew up in a household where everyone brewed, though he jokes that his dad's early efforts in the 1970s were "the world's most horrible beer". Years working in the West Australian mines funded the return home and the decision to do something they actually loved. He sharpened his skills with an apprenticeship at Cassels in Christchurch, contract brewed around the country for a while, and eventually took over the old Slab Brewing site in Parkvale. The name is a nod to Ed's chemical background and the everyday magic of fermentation, turning grain and water into liquid gold. Unfortunately "Alchemyst" was already taken, which led to some quick thinking and the invention of a Street that only exists in our minds. They made waves with fruit infused sours and big adjunct stouts, and have since built a core range that stands up alongside them. The brewhouse is tiny, the tanks few, and Ed is usually the one pouring in the taproom next door.

BEER // Irish red ale is one of the youngest old styles in brewing. It feels like something handed down through centuries of Irish pubs, but the category was put together in France in 1974, when the Pelforth brewery near Lille went looking for a foreign beer to brew under licence and settled on a recipe from a Wexford firm that had stopped brewing twenty years earlier. Coors took it to America, American craft brewers believed the heritage was real and began making their own, and suddenly there was a recognised style that nobody in Ireland had ever thought to name. What those Irish ales had been all along were English style bitters that Irish brewers simply never called bitter, tinted copper by a small handful of roasted barley. That pinch of roast is still the trick: enough to shift the colour and dry out the finish, without imparting too much flavour. Fuil, which is blood in Old Irish, is Alchemy Street's reading of it, though they take the wider Celtic label rather than the Irish one, and brew entirely with New Zealand malt and hops. It pours deep copper and toffee and caramel sit through the middle of it over an aroma of toasted grain. The finish is firmer and drier than most reds with a more pronounced hop character, and it is that bitterness holding the malt in check that keeps the whole thing from tipping into sweetness.

BREWERY // Alchemy Street�BEER // Fuil�STYLE // Irish Red Ale�ABV // 5.4%�ORIGIN // Tauranga�TEMP // 8 - 10 C�FOOD MATCH // Irish stew. Soda bread and Irish cheddar. Colcannon with bacon.�VESSEL // Nonic pint

17/07/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // 8 Wired began, as so many good breweries do, with a home-brew kit. Danish-born Søren Eriksen was living in Perth in 2005 when his future wife Monique handed him a Coopers starter kit; the first beers weren't great, but he was hooked. A move to Blenheim followed in 2008 and a job at Renaissance, who let him rent their tanks whenever they sat idle. That arrangement became 8 Wired, a gypsy operation that brewed its first beer in 2009 and, within two years, was crowned Champion Brewery at the Brewers Guild of New Zealand Awards, a startling result for an outfit with no home of its own. After five years borrowing space across four sites, Eriksen finally built a brewery in Warkworth, north of Auckland, where everything is now brewed and packaged. It has become one of the country's most important breweries, the home of Hopwired, arguably the first modern West Coast IPA brewed entirely with New Zealand hops, the mighty iStout imperial stout, and Tall Poppy, a landmark red IPA. Their barrel-ageing programme is one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, and you know we liver their steady stream of faithful European historic styles. Rogue & Villain belongs to that lineage.

BEER // The bitter is one of modern Britain's foundational beer styles, and its story is really the story of the industrial revolution. Until the early 1800s, malting relied on wood or straw fires that stained and smoked the grain. The spread of coke, coal baked clean of its impurities, let maltsters kiln barley gently and evenly, producing pale malt for the first time at scale. Combined with better transport, cheaper fuel and the famously sulphate-rich water of Burton on Trent, this opened the door to a new class of clean, pale, hop-forward beers. For much of their history the words "bitter" and "pale ale" were used interchangeably, and the various rungs, ordinary bitter, best bitter and the rest, were simply matters of strength, malt bill and how heavily the beer was taxed. Curiously, "extra special bitter" was never a style at all until the 1970s, when Fuller's of London gave the name to a single beer. Fuller's ESB proved so popular, particularly in the United States through the eighties and nineties, that brewers came to treat the three letters as a category rather than one brewery's brand. In a New Zealand market that overwhelmingly wants a hazy pale, a true-to-style bitter is a genuinely rare occurrence. We're used to the fruity delights of modern and New World hops so it's a refreshing treat to enjoy a beer with traditional English hops that are earthy and floral, with hedgerow character of brambles, nettles and dock leaves. The aroma opens with toffee, malt biscuit and marmalade over dry earth and sweet spice. The palate is weighty and bready, chocolate digestives and golden syrup meeting bitter citrus peel and dried stone fruit.

BREWERY // 8 Wired�BEER // Rogue & Villain �STYLE // Extra Special Bitter�ABV // 6%�ORIGIN // Auckland�TEMP // 8-12°C�FOOD MATCH // Roast beef. Mature cheddar ploughman's. Steak and ale pie�VESSEL // Nonic pint. English tulip pint

09/07/2026

This week BEER CLUB members are drinking…

BREWERY // Punk Heads is the brainchild of Aucklander Martin, who has spent the best part of thirty years in the booze trade. He began importing beer in the mid-nineties, chasing anything with a bit of difference, and gradually shifted into wine distribution as New Zealand's appetite for imported beer faded away. All those years on the road left him with a thick contact book and, eventually, the itch to put out something of his own. The brand was almost called Steampunk, until he discovered an American brewery already had the name, so Punk Heads it became, a nod to the music he grew up on. That heritage runs through the cans: each label carries a hidden song lyric planted to catch out anyone who reckons they know their music, and the steampunk-flavoured artwork comes from Fiona Clark, an artist Martin first met through the wine world. Punk Heads is a contract brewery with no stainless steel of their own. Releases arrive when they arrive, every three or four months, with no fixed core range. Hazy pale ales and IPAs have led the way so far. Hammer Head is his first crack at a pilsner.

BEER // The West Coast Pilsner is one of the more recent additions to the craft canon, and a slightly cheeky one at that. For many decades the pilsner sat as the clean, pale, faintly bitter lager that macro breweries churned out by the tanker load, the very beer craft drinkers were trying to escape. The West Coast version takes that crisp lager backbone and loads it with the same big American hops you would expect in a West Coast IPA, with a dry finish and the clarity of flavour that comes from a decent lagering period. The result is a sort of diplomatic handshake between two camps: enough lager familiarity to reassure the pilsner drinker, enough hop punch to keep the IPA crowd interested. Martin made Hammer Head to change the minds of craft drinkers who ordinarily shy away from Pilsners. The hops are Citra, Pacifica and Chinook, the Citra doing most of the heavy lifting on aroma with bright citrus and soft orange zest, the Pacifica and Chinook lending a resinous, punchy edge underneath. In the glass it pours bright and pale, aromatic and lively on the nose. The drinking is crisp and properly dry, with the hops up front and just a whisper of bready pilsner malt sitting in the back palate to stop it feeling thin. It finishes clean and quick, the sort of beer that pulls you back for the next swig.

BREWERY // Punk Heads
BEER // Hammer Head
STYLE // West Coast Pilsner
ABV // 6%
ORIGIN // Auckland
TEMP // 4-6°C
FOOD MATCH // Fish and chips. Spicy fried chicken. Sharp cheddar.
VESSEL // Pilsner flute. Willi Becher.

Beer Jerk

10/09/2026

03/09/2026

27/08/2026

20/08/2026

14/08/2026

07/08/2026

31/07/2026

23/07/2026

17/07/2026

09/07/2026

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